Daniel Libeskind - Chamber Works

Inside & Outside

The first time I saw the set of 28 drawings done by Daniel Libeskind, I tried to get the information by reading not just seeing. However, I could only describe the drawings as something having a kind of uncertain relationship with Architecture, partly maybe because I’ve already known Daniel Libeskind who used to engage in education of architecture as an architect.I have the same question “Why, for example, are these works architectural and not sculptural or simply concrete poetry”, mentioned in Peter Eisenman’s representation of the limit, though the lines and points could be found as fragments of some traditional architectural drawings. Without giving out the answer, Peter Eisenman sees the issue in a unique way:

“This is similar to the question; at what point is a shelter a 'house', or when is a structure 'architecture' and not merely building. Or in what context is a line drawn on the ground or lines on a piece of paper architectural rather than graphic or sculptural. Do they relate to architecture by a function: defining outside from inside, sacred from profane, shelter from not shelter? To invoke 'architectural' by a function is again to seek limits from inside, a return to form in a causal relationship to function.”

Although I’ve been involved myself in Architecture no more than 5 years, I find what we mostly focus on is the culture, function and the appearance. Actually, under the education which still hasn’t totally understood the Modernity, only function and appearance is cared about in the judgment system. As a result, we cannot define architecture without the function, which drag us in design. Till now I realize that maybe we have been tied in the small circle all the time, defining outside from inside complacently.

So I jump out of the old definition of architecture and read the chamber works again with the new conception called “Not-Architecture” which also brought by Peter Eisenman. As he said, a 'not-architecture' would be intimate with architecture, would know it, would contain it, as architecture would know and contain a 'not-architecture'; it would constitute a relationship to being by not being. I regard the ‘not-architecture’ as a new interpretation of architecture.

The chamber works has been accomplished for 26 years, but it may have some affinity with the “Living Architecture”. I’ll end this topic by the description in Daniel Libeskind’s unoriginal signs.

“This work in search of architecture has discovered no permanent structure, no constant form, and no universal type. I have realized that the result of this journey in search of the 'essentials' undermines, in the end, the very premise of their existence. Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be. Architecture as nonexistent reality is a symbol, which in the process of consciousness leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch equivalent depth of unoriginality.”